With still lifes, bold move made

Letinsky masters the modern twist

Carter plants a flag

March 14, 2012

Laura Letinsky is a seductress of remains.

Previously, that has meant beguiling the leftovers of real or imaginary dinner parties and small meals, the twisted piles of orange peels and tilted stacks of dirty china, into posing just so on the edges of tablecloths while she took their picture. It has also meant luring viewers to gaze intently at those pictures, finding in them the richness of detail and metaphor that once clung to the painted vanitas of Dutch minor masters.

"Ill Form and Void Full," Letinsky's latest series, is no exception, though it makes a study not of real remains but paper ones. Instead of constructing her still lifes from crusty silverware and wilted flowers, she's fashioned elaborate tableaux from table settings and foodstuffs cut out of magazines, plus a few real pits and peels. Eight untitled images are on view in a small solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Overall the work feels not unpleasantly like studies of Letinsky's earlier work, only done after the fact. Or like a photographer's version of musical theme and variation. As in theme and variation, although the original melody remains recognizable, something new must be introduced.

Then there's the issue of what's real and what isn't. Lychee skin — real. Honeydew peel — paper. (I think.) But is it even accurate to consider Letinsky's photo of frisee to be more real than her photo of a photo of stewed onions? In a world of social media and virtual reality, such assessments take on ontological importance.

Blank and printed sheets of paper with vase-like holes raise questions about perception in the face of absence. Is the void full or empty if it's vaguely recognizable? Is the negative form of a flower enough to impart its presence? And what happened to the parts that were cut out? This worry feels existential. Meanwhile the holes behave like Rorschach blots, especially in an image as erotic as "Untitled #29," with its orgy of roast beef slices, stemmed cherry, seedy cantaloupe and split peach.

If there could be such a thing, Letinsky would be a Dutch master of the present, employing a 4x5 camera instead of paintbrushes to capture the bittersweet scent of life crumpling away, into the remains of food eaten but also food cooked simply for the sake of a Bon Appetit photo shoot. The drippy, crackly gorgeousness of what results never fails to surprise. But what doesn't glow more as a memory?

Letinsky's show is the second installment of the BMO Harris Bank Chicago Works series at the MCA. The play on words makes for a poor title, not least because the joke seems to be on Chicago artists. No kidding, they work hard. Whether or not Chicago works for them is the perennial question.

Once emerging artists would've had their sights set on the MCA's 12x12: New Artists/New Work series, which gave many locals their first important showing. With Chicago Works taking its place, and casting a broader net, regional university galleries like UIC's Gallery 400 and NEIU's Fine Arts Center Gallery will hopefully continue to pick up the slack. The College of DuPage's Gahlberg Gallery is doing its part with an exhibition by Dana Carter.

"Letter to the Night" begins and ends with a poem by Federico García Lorca, a Spanish poet who died in 1936. Neither the version painted on the gallery's plate glass entrance wall nor the one performed in a video by the artist as she stands in a boat on a pond can be understood by anyone except those who read semaphores, a system for conveying the characters of the alphabet via bi-color square flags held in different positions.

To Carter's credit this deliberate failure to communicate registers delicate mystery and not forcible obscurantism. The rhythmic waving pattern of the black and silver flags gives the impression of being accessible, while mostly hypnotizing through form.

In other works, common materials are used in ways both abstract and so richly evocative that metaphors accumulate effortlessly. Twelve black fabric panels, stained with saltwater and stitched with rainbow thread study shadows of shadows, the beach at night, the light of the moon behind clouds, the endless cycle of precipitation and evaporation.

The checklist provides important details. "Fabric, sunlight, window pane, streetlamp," reads the materials entry for a photographic triptych. Process revealed, without otherwise cluttering works that register with the ethereal reverberations of stained glass.